


Ten Things to do After Breaking up with the Love of your Life

by queen_of_hells_bells



Series: The Five-Step Guide [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Angst, Baking, D&D, Jealous!Cas, Little bit of Fluff, M/M, Sadness, Sam is a moose, cas is still a dick, dean is still mopey, drunk!Cas, jealous!Dean, man-whore, that's mostly it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-03
Updated: 2014-06-03
Packaged: 2018-02-03 05:57:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1733612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queen_of_hells_bells/pseuds/queen_of_hells_bells
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five things for each of them (as in Dean and Cas). The five most important things to do after you break up with the love of your life, as according to them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ten Things to do After Breaking up with the Love of your Life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MirkatManor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MirkatManor/gifts).



> Regular is Cas, Italics are Dean.  
> Didja like it?

First: Pick up the phone just to put it back down again.

He wanted to call, he really did; he knew he owed Dean some sort of explanation. Hours would go by, just him staring at the phone like it had personally offended him.

Every now and then the damn thing would go off, and hope would spring up in his chest, only to be squashed by the annoying tone of a stranger saying “Hello, my name is-” before he hung up.

At first Gabriel was sympathetic, but after a few weeks he’d had enough. Stooping low, the short man pulled the plug from the socket, moving to stand directly in front of his brother.

“You are pathetic.” Castiel opened his mouth to protest, but Gabriel raised a hand. “We’re going out tonight to get smashed. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.”

 

_First: Find a new bookstore._

_Sure it took him most of the weekend and exhausted all his ‘google-fu’ (as Sam--the_ girl _\--called it) skills, but he finally found a little book boutique that was enough like Ca--enough like his old one that Lili would probably be okay with it, but different as well._

_For one, it wasn’t owned by a devastatingly handsome man. Instead, it was operated by a young redhead called Charlie, who said she was just the manager. But her boss lived in Barbados, so she thought her job was pretty secure._

_And maybe it took a little while for Lili’s five-year-old brain to come to terms with never seen ‘Unca Cas’ again, but she also warmed up to Charlie (“Like my Charizard!”) pretty quick, and within a few months the two of them were thick as thieves, Cas all but forgotten._

_Den would just sight and look on with jealousy, wishing he could forget as easily._

 

Second: Sleep around.

The night Castiel and Gabriel went out drinking was his downfall. It was the beginning of ‘The Story of Cassie’s Great Orgy’, as Gabriel liked to call it.

For the next year, Castiel would go out nearly every night, get totally smashed, and have sex. With anyone. So what if he’d always thought he was gay? Girls seemed to be pretty great too. Not the same of course, and none of them were as good as D--but that’s not why he was doing this, was he? To forget about him? No. It was just to prove that the stud Castiel couldn’t be tamed.

He spent the one-year anniversary of their breakup with a smoking hot brunette who called him Clarence. He never did get her name.

And he could have carried on in that vein, and probably convinced himself that he was happy, except that one day Gabriel made him do the grocery shopping.

 

_Second: Resolutely avoid telling your brother._

_Or, at least, hold out as long as you can. In fairness, when your brother is a master of the ‘you just kicked my puppy’ face, you can really only reject him so many times. And so, Dean found himself spilling his guts to his brother on a monthly night out, a few months after the fact._

_Sam, being the giant moose that he truly way, had wanted to immediately go to Castiel’s apartment and break his door down. After that, Dean wasn’t sure what the plan was, but he convinced Sam that it wasn’t worth it. That he was the one who had really broken it off by sending Castiel away._

_Of course, Sam saw right through his bullshit._

_Sunday dinner, for the next few weeks, was a special kind of hell. Dean knew he never should have told his stupid moose of a baby brother._

 

Third: If you see him with someone, run away.

He was a tall blonde, a little scruffy looking, wearing a pea coat and a black cap. The hat was one of those old-fashioned ones you see in old British movies. He was strangely handsome, and Castiel hated him on sight.

Actually, he looked like he might have a few interesting stories to tell: this tall, gruff-looking man standing in the baking aisle of the grocery stores, inspecting the flours as though his life depended on it. It wasn’t an image one saw very often, and any other time Castiel would have been intrigued.

This particular handsome blond, however, was with _another_ handsome blonde. One that Castiel would rather he wasn’t with.

Dean looked happy, laughing at something tall, blonde, and rough said as he examined the bags of flour. Apparently Dean found flour humorous before. There was something in the way the two men looked at each other, as though there was a lifetime of stories and jokes hidden away beneath their skin, memories that they shared.

Had Dean ever looked at _him_ like that? He didn’t know.

Standing, watching the pair for only a moment longer, Castiel suddenly realized that he hadn’t gotten anything on his list, and turned to move away, pushing down the hurt inside and only allowing himself to feel glad that Dean had managed to move on.

 

_Third: Make new friends._

_There was really no way he could avoid it after meeting Charlie. She was such a presence in his life, and had she not made if so obnoxiously clear that she was gay, he totally would have hooked up with her. It was better this way, though. He’d not really had a best friend before, but he sure had one now._

_She dragged him into all her damn nerdy shit. As it turns out, in addition to managing ‘Books Anonymous’, Charlie was also a PhD student at KU, and was head of the Nerd Club. The actual name of the club had been lost long ago, but the members thought that generic Nerd suited most of them, so they embraced the insult and made it their motto._

_It was there that Dean met Kevin, Garth, and Chuck. The three of them, besides being dragged out to be knights of Moondor every other month, also met up to play Garth’s vintage version of D &D. The group grew when Dean added his friend Benny, the Home Ec teacher at school, Jo and her brother Ash, and sometimes Sammy._

_Every now and then he couldn’t help thinking that Cas would have enjoyed D &D, but then he remembers that night he saw Cas at the bar, and pushes all thoughts of him out of his mind to enjoy his friends._

 

Fourth: Work all the time.

And just like that his man-whore ways were over. Gabriel probably would have commented on it if he still lived with Castiel, but he’d moved out a few weeks ago to live with his girlfriend--pardon. His fiance. Gabriel and Kali were getting married. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen it coming, it was just, for some reason, still surprising to him.

And so, for no other reason than that Dean seemed to have moved on, Castiel through himself into the store. He started staying open later, booking more travelling authors, getting better shipments, doing more public affairs. He hosted book clubs and children’s reading circles. During the summer months, he had a competition: whoever read the most books and correctly summarized them got a prize. It was a rousing success.

As long as he was in the store, he was fine.

As soon as he entered his apartment, he slept. He slept and dreamed of blonde hair and green eyes.

 

_Fourth: Get involved in new things._

_He got strangely involved in things at school. As much as he teased Benny about being the Home Ec teacher, he greatly enjoyed baking himself. Figures that as soon as Benny discovered_ that _little factoid, Dean got made the part-time Home Ec teacher, and Benny got made the part-time auto teacher. Figures. “Just a coincidence”, Benny had said, but Dean had seen that little twinkle in his friend’s eye. Coincidence his ass._

_He also volunteered at Lili’s school as often as he could, even going so far as to show up at her second-grade Father’s Day party when Sam was working a case out of town. Lili had been more than thrilled to have her uncle there, and it gave her a strange popularity amongst the other kids._

_In his more…fantastical life, Dean moved up from knight to earl to lord to advisor to the Queen. He and Charlie would hang out in her tent and strategize the troops, an activity Dean showed an alarming strength in. He claimed it was due to growing up playing Risk with an ex-Marine for a father. Charlie said it was because he was actually a psychopathic freak._

_It helped, all the things he did in his spare time. Helped to distract him._

 

Fifth: Try to convince yourself you did the right thing.

It was an uphill battle, and some days (most days) he lost. But he tried, every day, to convince himself that Dean was happier now. Better now. Without him. He tried, and for that they should give him a fucking medal.

That is, until his control ran out.

 

_Fifth: Pretend you’re not waiting for the phone to ring._

_It got easier as time went by, the lingering stares at the hunk of plastic became shorter and shorter. But every now and then Dean would find himself on his couch, staring at the damn thing, just waiting. Not that he ever told anyone, but a small shot of hope still ran up his spine every time it rang. And every time he was disappointed._

_Or, he was disappointed until the third anniversary of the breakup. The night his control snapped like a twig._


End file.
